Steven Hixson Toth is a wingnut who represented District 15 (suburban Montgomery County, part of the Houston Metro area) in the Texas House of Representatives between 2013 and 2015, and was reelected in 2018. Toth, who is partially responsible for allowing college and university officials to carry concealed weapons, the Firearms Protection Act (HB 1076) restricting federal control and regulations of firearms, and various heartbeat bills against abortion, is also the kind of wingnut who blames sex ed and Planned Parenthood for teen pregnancy and for kids having sex (no really: he seriously thinks instructions on proper use of condoms make teens who otherwise wouldn’t have thought about sex “hot and bothered”), supported by unverified and unverifiable anecdotes a person of his age and in his position really shouldn’t have had access to if they were true (unlikely).
A long-time sufferer from the Obama-derangement syndrome, Toth has for instance claimed that “Obama is taking the US to war with Syria and Russia so he can support his friends from Al-Qaeda in Syria.”
He has also been involved in the Texas education wars, leading the 2013 wingnut campaign against CSCOPE, a curriculum management tool created through a collaboration of state Education Service Centers, based on the manufactured charge that the program’s lessons were anti-American and anti-Christian and promoted Marxism and Islam, a charge as baseless as it is revealing of the bias and post-truth-politization-of-facts mindset of people like Steve Toth (Dan Patrick and David Dewhurst were others making similar charges). He has more recently made good friends with the anti-vaccine group Texans for Vaccine Choice, who describes him as someone who “already has a strong baseline knowledge of our issue.”
And lest you’d think that Toth’s loss in the 2015 reflected a modicum of sense on the part of the Montgomery electorate, you should know that he was replaced by Mike Keough, who thinks that the separation of church is a humanist, socialist plot.
Diagnosis: Looney wingnut with a tendency toward endorsing deranged conspiracy theories – a typical representative of the post-truth phenomenon in the current political climate. Ultimately, however, it seems to be the voters of Montgomery County that are to blame here and who really should have been awarded with this entry.
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